xasy: seriously, read the de soto report.
it changes the terms of debate.
and it IS possible to have a rational debate about israel and its role in creating and maintaining the appalling conditions in gaza. you know, by putting the place under seige. creating such conditions is the point of a seige. qed.
it's hard to direct folk to something kinda long and a bit demanding in this context--but fact is that i am really not interested in old bytes about how evil hamas was in some views, but rather on a short-term dynamic, which is the one i pointed to in the part of my op that you bit above, and which you ducked speaking about. thing is that the us and israel had a choice when hamas was elected and to my mind they fucked it up and now--again--palestinians in gaza are paying for it.
the pa was prevented--actively---from governing. the majority of the resources that the pa would have required were frozen by the israelis with american support. this move only followed logically from the axis of evil idiocy. it is a fuck up of a very tall order, one that really has to be added to the seemingly endless supply of such fuck ups that constitutes the history of the bush administration. but this is big.
here it is again, from the nameless washington envoy:
Quote:
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on page 21 of de soto's report there is a quote from an american envoy, repeated twice at a meeting in march 2006, which i think sums up the bush administration's attitude: "i like this violence," he said, because "it means that other palestinians are resisting hamas."
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and o yeah--there have been a number of articles over the past week concerning machinations underway for the americans via egypt to arm fatah. that should help the party that the bushenvoy already likes so much reach a house-rockin level, dontcha think?
de soto had resigned from his post and wrote the report as an internal document aimed at doing something of what he thought the un could do (but isnt)--providing an impartial view of the chaotic situation, legitimating itself as a separate entity with a meaningful role in the process--whatever that means now--because it has the best most comprehensive information. and the report was not supposed to be leaked--but it was. so this is a rare document, written by someone with nothing to loose. read it. there's alot of talk about in it. "o hamas is bad bad bad" is in this context just blah blah blah--all it shows is that you havent read the report and are not having the same conversation because of that.